CIA Director John Ratcliffe has emerged as President Donald Trump's "quiet hammer," a source close to the White House told Breitbart News for an in-depth profile of the world's premier spy agency in the first year back in office for Trump.

This source specifically pointed to how Trump sent Ratcliffe down to Venezuela just 12 days after the daring mission in which U.S. forces captured now-ousted leader Nicolas Maduro. Ratcliffe, Trump's highest-ranking and first cabinet-level official to visit the nation since Maduro's capture, met with acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez.

"Ratcliffe has become Trump's quiet hammer," this source close to the White House said. "He goes in, accomplishes whatever mission the President gave him, then disappears back into the shadows. The Agency seems to have adopted the same approach, so Trump actually deserves credit for turning the CIA into an instrument of America First power."

For this story, Breitbart News spoke with CIA officials, Director Ratcliffe himself, and many others across the administration and those familiar with the Agency's actions for a year-in-review look back at how Ratcliffe has handled reshaping and reforming the CIA in Trump's vision — a monumental task given the damage done to the Intelligence Community (IC) during previous administrations and under previous CIA directors particularly John Brennan during Barack Obama's administration.

"Under Director John Ratcliffe, CIA is back to focusing on mission and is executing on President Trump's national security priorities," CIA Director of Public Affairs Liz Lyons told Breitbart News. "This is a more aggressive CIA willing to take risks to give the United States a decisive advantage. In less than a year, CIA helped deliver historic wins — especially in the Middle East and Western Hemisphere — to safeguard American interests and bolster our National Security."

One of the biggest flaws that Brennan and others who politicized intelligence introduced to the CIA was a dwindling of Agency assets and spies over time — basically, as the CIA became more focused on politics, it became less focused on mission-critical objectives.

One major accomplishment of Ratcliffe's so far as CIA director has been the total dismantlement of any Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — or DEI — programs at the Agency. He disbanded all DEI initiatives and eliminated all DEI-related programs there, and he returned the CIA to a culture of merit.

Ratcliffe has also been on a transparency tear at the CIA since he was confirmed. He released thousands of documents related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. He also tasked CIA professionals with decades of combined experience with conducting reviews on lessons learned when it comes to the procedures of analytic tradecraft employed in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) shortly after the 2016 presidential election — where the IC made inaccurate conclusions about Trump and Russia — and declassified that review so the public could see it.